My Writing History

I would have to say fourth grade really got me going with my love for writing. I wrote as much fiction as I could that year even if the assignment was calling for a non-fiction piece. For example, we were supposed to write a story about our hero so I started creating this elaborate story about how my dog saved my life... My teacher made me re-do the assignment and write about a real person so that didn't work out to well. But there were many other times that we could write fiction that year so I got my fair share of creative writing in. The next year my English teacher barely had us write at all so my love for writing died down until about seventh grade. I took a writing class that year where about half of all of our writing was fictional. 

In the spring semester of my eighth grade year, I started writing my first novel via long hand in a purple notebook. Once into the story a bit, I began typing it up and would continue to add to it long hand in the car. After about 15,000 words, though, I gave up. It is still an unfinished work that I don't know if I will ever get back to. The reason I gave up on it is simply because of my inconsistent writing schedule (or lack thereof). I would work on my novel several days in a row and then go a month or two without working on it at all.

Later, I thought about doing NaNoWriMo in 2008 with a different story than the one I had started in January of that year but I didn't write more than 1,000 words and gave up on that story too. I didn't actually finish a book until August Novel Writing Month (AugNoWriMo) in 2009 (over a year and a half after I first started trying to write novels) and even that book was only 13,000 words long. It felt good at the time, though, because it was my first completed novel. A few months later, in November of 2009, I competed in and won NaNoWriMo and then had a 50,000 word novel under my belt. I did that again in June of 2010 and was up to three novels.

Writing my two 50,000 words novels made me so happy and made me feel like I was a writer. Now if I sent them to a publisher in current form, the publisher would role on the floor with laughter. But it was fun, exciting, and educational. And now I have three completed novels because of three month-long challenges. Now I'm working on my fourth novel. But one of my 2011 goals is to edit one of my NaNoWriMo novels, Shiloh's Children. I haven't actually started editing yet but it is on my mind often and I will get to work on it soon.